


Conversations in the Light

by belovedmuerto



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Conversations, M/M, empath!John, experiments in empathy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-01
Updated: 2014-03-01
Packaged: 2018-01-14 03:23:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,080
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1250950
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/belovedmuerto/pseuds/belovedmuerto
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Some more conversing happens. John needs to learn how to talk; or, God, these guys just don't shut up, do they?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Conversations in the Light

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to moonblossom for looking this over for me. 
> 
> I'm not the happiest ever with this, thus I reserve the right to completely overhaul it at some point in the future. But for now, you get the gist of things, anyway.
> 
> Also, I apologize for the dumb title.

Greg turns at the blast of cold, wet air that sweeps into the pub when the door swings open. He sees John standing just inside, shaking water out of his hair and shrugging out of his jacket, hanging it on one of the hooks near the door.

The pub is quiet, dimly lit, cozy. It’s one of the reasons they usually come here, when they manage to get together for pints. It’s also close to Baker Street and along Greg’s Tube line (although he spends a lot of time at Mycroft’s these days, and he more-than-half expects there to be a black car waiting for him outside when he leaves in a few hours).

Greg watches John cross the pub to where he’s sat. He’s smiling a little, and it’s genuine, as far as Greg can tell. He looks better than he has in months. Healthier. Happier. They haven’t seen each other in a while, not since shortly after John’s empathy returned, and Greg feels a great deal of relief to see John looking more like his old self. 

He expects that the extended Christmas holiday in Sussex that he’d taken with Sherlock probably has at least a bit to do with that. 

“Fucking rain,” John grouses by way of greeting, clapping Greg on the back as he takes the seat next to him. “All right, mate?”

“All right,” Greg replies. He looks down the bar to catch Simon’s eye so they can order. “It’s been raining for two weeks solid, I swear.”

Simon comes down and greets John. Both men order pints, and Simon goes off to pour those.

“According to Sherlock, sixteen days straight,” John says.

Greg smiles. “I think it stopped for about twenty minutes last Wednesday, actually.”

John laughs. “He’s been bemoaning the criminal classes again. I’m going to have to find him something to do soon, or else he’ll get destructive. Thankfully he spent today absorbed in slime.”

“It’s been a quiet few weeks, true. No one wants to go out and be a villain in this weather.”

“Thank God,” John sighs. “I don’t really want to slog around in it either. And you know he never notices the weather or gets anything so mundane as a cold, either. Leaves all that to me.”

Greg smiles into his pint and John chuckles. It’s a good thing to hear. It feels like it’s been a long time since Greg heard his friend laugh. They settle for a few minutes into companionable silence, enjoying their pints and the relaxed evening together.

“So how was your Christmas?” Greg asks, breaking the silence again.

John smiles. “Yeah, it was good. Really good.”

“I think yours lasted a bit longer than mine did,” Greg grumbles, and so what if he’s a little bitter about it? He’s also happy that Sherlock and John have that retreat when they need it. And jealous, too. Just a little though. In the good way. It’s not like he can’t hide out here and there in Mycroft’s ridiculously posh house when he needs the break.

And they’ve been talking about taking a holiday themselves. Somewhere warm. With water and sunlight and private beaches, according to Mycroft. Not that Greg objects to any of that, as long as there is the warm and Mycroft is there to enjoy the private beach with him.

He’ll have to make sure the man wears SPF 3000 the whole time, though. He’s too ginger underneath his dyed hair for his own good.

John looks at him for a moment, steadily, and then he nods. “It did. We needed it. _I_ needed it. It’s been a rough few months.” He shrugs, doesn’t apologize. But neither does he seem unaccepting of Greg’s feelings, or surprised at them. 

So he changes the subject, for now. “Have you decided when you’re taking the honeymoon?”

John snorts. “The honeymoon in southern France Mycroft gave us?”

“No, the one on Mars I gave you.”

John doesn’t dignify the sarcasm with a reply. “We’re thinking next month, probably. The weather will be starting to warm up, we should get plenty of sun, at least. What about you? How was your Christmas?”

“It was good,” Greg replies. And it was. He and Mycroft had spent it together, and it was quiet. Nice. No hassles, no work for a few days, and no distractions except each other.

“That’s good,” John says, and he smiles. Greg knows that John can feel his quiet contentment with his relationship with Mycroft, and he wonders how that makes John feel. Does he like feeling that sort of thing, from other people? It must be easier when he and Sherlock are in a good place themselves, he supposes.

“How have you been doing?” Greg asks, later in the evening, when they’ve both had two pints and he feels just slightly loosened up enough to bring up _feelings_. “You look better than you have, the last few times I saw you.”

John shrugs, concentrating on his pint glass. He takes a drink and puts the glass down on the bar. He shrugs again. “I’m all right, I guess. Better, yeah. Mostly.” 

John shrugs again, and Greg lets it go. He isn’t psychic, but he can tell John’s not comfortable talking about it right now. 

Perhaps later, after another beer, or another time entirely. It must suck, knowing how everyone around you feels pretty much all the time, and not being able to share how you feel yourself for whatever reason.

\----

The rain has let up, some. It’s tapered into a miserable, cold drizzle that seems to find its way down the collar of John’s jacket and scarf and onto his neck despite the umbrella he’s got over his head. 

Sherlock is overjoyed, flitting about the crime scene in a high of deductions and cleverness. The rain doesn’t seem to touch him; his coat collar is pulled up and his scarf is secure around his neck. Every now and again he’ll turn his head and the light from the streetlamp will catch on the drops of rain in his hair, giving him the appearance of a halo.

John almost snorts out loud at the thought of Sherlock as anything even remotely resembling angelic, and the man himself shoots a quick inquisitive glance his way across the crime scene. John just shakes his head in reply, _it’s nothing_ , and Sherlock gives a minute shrug and goes back to his investigation.

This one hasn’t been so bad. The crime scene, that is, not the crime itself. But the crime scene is remarkably calm--oh, of course. This isn’t where the murder happened, this is just where the body was dumped. 

The relief he feels surprises him, enough so that he doesn’t think to try and stifle it, so it won’t startle Sherlock, or throw him off.

Sherlock looks over at him again, and he shrugs, makes a face. There’s really no way to explain it to Sherlock. If he doesn’t already know that this is not where the murder was committed, then he’ll figure it out for himself soon enough.

\----

Sherlock does figure it out, of course. He does miss things sometimes, but it doesn’t seem to last long, and he rarely repeats a mistake. 

Perhaps John’s relief helped tipped him off. Who knows?

There’s a second crime scene, this one much more gruesome than the first. John, though, has braced himself, and is able to keep the emotions of it from bleeding over, for the most part. It gives him a headache, though. One he’ll have a hard time getting rid of, he suspects.

After the second crime scene, there’s the lull of waiting while Sherlock sinks into his own thoughts, putting the pieces together. And then there’s the running, and the catching of the criminal, and the usual post-case mundanities.

Sherlock spends the whole cab ride home, very late that night, complaining about how dull the case turned out to be.

\----

“You were relieved.”

John shifts and tries to pry his eyes open. He’s not really awake, not entirely. “Time’zit?” he slurs, instead of answering. 

Sherlock huffs, but a moment later he speaks. “It’s five twelve in the morning, John.”

John groans. No wonder he’s so groggy, he’d only just got to sleep. Sherlock has to do this now?

Sherlock snugs in close to him and snorts against the skin just behind his ear. “Don’t give me that, John. Explain. You were relieved at the dump site today, but I didn’t feel much of anything from you at the actual crime scene.”

John shifts against him, rolls onto his back; Sherlock allows it. John rubs his hands over his face and sighs, thinks for a moment. Sherlock waits with, for him, admirable patience, nuzzling John’s neck, emanating curiosity and that particular Sherlockian need to know everything when it comes to John.

“Tell me?” Sherlock prompts, after a few minutes.

John sighs again. He’s just not sure how to word it. Not sure how to explain the way crime scenes feel in his head. Well, no, that part isn’t so hard.

They feel uniformly awful.

“It was a dump site,” he says slowly, cringing at it, at refering to the place where that poor guy had been left, to be found by anyone, no respect for the life he’d lived. Which, of course not, he been _murdered_. “There wasn’t much there, emotionally.”

“Right,” Sherlock agrees. He doesn’t seem to quite understand what John is saying. Sherlock still sometimes has a hard time with the emotional stuff, with processing it the way John does.

“Normally, there’s a lot of residual emotion at a crime scene like that. I was relieved not to have to deal with that, for once. Well, for a while, anyway. Until we found the actual scene of the murder.”

Sherlock is quiet for a while, and John can feel him thinking, processing. He’s probably going over every crime scene they’ve attended together since John forged the connection between them. He wonders if Sherlock will feel betrayed, or if he’ll understand. 

John has gone all drowsy again, his mind starting to float, warm in bed with Sherlock, when Sherlock speaks again.

“I didn’t feel much of anything from you at the actual murder site.”

John hums his acknowledgement. Sherlock’s emotions are complicated, as prickly as ever. But he’s not angry with John. For a few minutes, he feels not much of anything at all from Sherlock, despite their closeness, the skin-to-skin contact that makes their connection so much stronger and clearer.

It makes him afraid. He understands why Sherlock tries it, though, his insatiable need to experiment, to understand.

“I don’t do it with the way I feel,” John says softly.

“I know,” Sherlock replies. After a moment, he adds, “You’re reasons are rational, John. I am not angry with you about this.”

John sighs yet again. “Do you want to hear about it?”

“Not necessarily about this one in particular, but I’d like to know how crime scenes feel to you in general, how they make you feel.”

“All right,” John agrees.

“We can talk about it in the morning, if you’d like. You should go back to sleep, John.”

John smiles a little, and snuggles closer to Sherlock, who sighs contentedly and presses a kiss to his temple.

\----

Sherlock isn’t in bed when John wakes up in the morning. This isn’t actually at all uncommon. Sherlock sleeps a hell of a lot more than he did when they first met and started living and working together, because John has had a positive effect on his sleep schedule, much to Sherlock’s dismay. He still grumbles about it quite a bit.

John takes a few minutes to wake up. And then he spends a few more minutes thinking about what he wants to say to Sherlock, and how to say it. He doesn’t like articulating such things as the way emotions affect him, but he knows he needs to, for their sake, for the sake of their relationship and their future.

He may never be without Sherlock in his head, but that doesn’t mean either of them should be complacent. That doesn’t mean they can’t fuck this up totally and irrevocably. That doesn’t mean there’s no work for them to do, for _him_ to do. Sherlock is much better than he used to be about articulating his needs and emotions, and John needs to put forth the effort to improve, for his own sake and for Sherlock’s.

He’s terrified of it.

John takes a moment to look at that fear. He’s afraid of failure, of trying to speak and being incapable of it it, incapable of finding the right words. He’s afraid of losing Sherlock. He doesn’t think he’s actually afraid of sharing the emotions themselves, of being vulnerable, just of not being about to do it well.

That’s good. John takes that, and gets out of bed.

\----

Sherlock is in dressing gown and pyjamas still, goggles on, gloves on, standing over two bubbling beakers on the kitchen table with a manic and excited tinge to the way he feels. John imagines he knows the gleam that’s probably in Sherlock’s eyes, though he can’t see them right now.

John sighs, turns around, and goes back into their room. If it’s volatile enough that Sherlock is wearing goggles and gloves, it’s not worth it for John to go in there, even for tea. So he gets dressed in whatever comes to hand--yesterday’s jeans and button down, trainers, and a jumper. Clean enough all, for a trip downstairs to Speedy’s. 

“Want anything from the cafe?” he asks Sherlock from the hallway as he’s shrugging into his jacket.

“No, I’m fine,” Sherlock replies. John’s surprised he manages even that much, with how concentrated on his experiment he is.

“All right. Back in a few.”

Sherlock merely hums at this. John doesn’t distract him further.

\----

John sits in the lounge, on the sofa so as to be out of the direct line of fire if the kitchen explodes (again), to eat his bacon roll and drink his coffee. He thinks he maybe should’ve gone down the street to the Pret, because they do have better coffee, but oh well. 

After he’s eaten, he picks up the paper and reads while he waits for Sherlock to finish his experiment, so they can talk about this. He’s vaguely nervous, and he knows why, but he tries to ignore it.

It will be interesting, having this sort of conversation in the light of day. John’s not sure they’ve ever done that before. But it’ll be him doing the talking this time, not Sherlock, and he doesn’t have quite the same aversion to being able to see the person he’s talking to that Sherlock does.

But then, he’s always suspected that Sherlock does a lot of blushing when he talks about the way he feels, and doesn’t want John to see it, even if he can feel it.

He can tell when Sherlock is ready to talk, ready to listen, not just from the way he feels. Sherlock tidies up the kitchen--for a certain value of ‘tidy’ anyway--and takes off the gloves and the goggles, comes into the lounge with a cup of tea, sitting in his chair and looking expectantly at John.

“Will you come and sit with me?” John asks.

Sherlock complies without a word, sits close to John, so that they’re touching, shoulder to shoulder, knee to knee, thigh to thigh. John takes comfort in that, the way he has always taken comfort in Sherlock’s touch, in his proximity, in the comfort Sherlock feels at being near John, at touching him. John has always found comfort in it, even when it caused him physical pain to touch Sherlock.

“You understand why I try to block you from feeling the emotional residue that lingers at a crime scene?”

“Yes, John. I told you.”

“Will you tell me what you see my reasons to be?”

Sherlock gets a look for a moment, like he can’t decide whether to smile or scowl. It screws up his face for a moment, half amused, half aggravated and put-upon, and John nearly laughs at him.

“You know it could be a distraction to me and from the Work, from observing and deducing, to be confronted with the emotions at a crime scene. It’s a rational choice, John. I appreciate it. You share things about that with me if it is relevant, which is fine and occasionally helpful.”

_Ah, there’s the Sherlock I love._ John pats his knee, amused.

“What I want to know is how it affects you, John. Even afterwards, you don’t talk about it.”

“To be fair,” John replies, “there is often an excess of running and danger afterwards.”

“Or the morgue.” Sherlock is smiling, though.

“Yes, sometimes the morgue. I usually am able to let it go fairly quickly. They don’t stick with me like they used to.”

Sherlock doesn’t reply, and continues not to speak, giving John time to gather his thoughts and his courage.

“Hopeless,” he says, eventually. “They often make me feel hopeless.”

Sherlock opens his mouth to say something, thinks better of it, and shuts it again.

“There’s a lot of negativity at crime scenes, obviously,” John continues. “Anger and fear and hatred and rage. Those I can filter out, let go. They’re expected.”

Sherlock nods.

“There’s sometimes sickness--perversions of other emotions and obsessions and need.” John pauses for a few minutes.

Sherlock sets down his cup of tea and takes John’s hand. For a few moments, John doesn’t speak, he just calls up the memories of crime scenes and lets them filter through their link. He lets Sherlock see them and feel how they felt to John.

“But there’s also love there, sometimes. Love gone horribly wrong, but still. Love. And it hurts. It makes me feel hopeless about humanity.”

He realises how hard he is squeezing Sherlock’s hand, and he lets go, changes his grip so their fingers are twined together.

“I’ve always wondered if that’s part of why you do what you do. Because it’s such a perversion, and solving the crime gives you some glimmer of hope back.”

They sit quietly for a long time. John tucks himself in close to Sherlock, his head on Sherlock’s shoulder, and Sherlock lets go of his hand in favor of putting his arm around John, pulling him in closer.

“It does,” Sherlock says, eventually.


End file.
